Meanwhile, Goldman earned a business degree from the École des hautes études commerciales du Nord (EDHEC) in Lille.

Goldman first entered the French music scene as a member of a progressive rock group named Taï Phong ("great wind" or "typhoon" in Vietnamese), which released its first album in 1975.

After three albums in English (on which he sang and played guitar as well as violin), Goldman was determined to write and sing in French, and this led him to leave the band.

The recording includes several hit singles: "Quand la musique est bonne", "Comme toi" (inspired by a picture of a young Jewish girl who died in a concentration camp, although the heartfelt lyrics never reveal a specific historical context), and "Au bout de mes rêves".

Yet most critics were harsh, deriding Goldman's high-pitched voice as well as his style and demeanour (described as too tame and innocuous) in a collection of softer songs presumably marketed to teenage girls.

In reaction, at the end of 1985 Goldman purchased a full-page rebuttal in two major newspapers (Libération and France Soir) in which he displayed excerpts from his harshest reviews.

He also appended an ironic message for his fans, once again demonstrating his taste for unassuming self-promotion: "Thanks for coming anyway..." ("Merci d'être venus quand même...").

Jones joined the band after Goldman decided to stop touring, and the trio had their first breakout hit in 1985 with "Je te donne".

Together they recorded two studio albums, Fredericks / Goldman / Jones in 1990 and Rouge in 1993 (inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR.

The title song features the Red Army Choir), one live album, Du New Morning au Zénith, and the trio also released several successful singles: "Nuit", "À nos actes manqués", "Né en 17 à Leidenstadt" (another song about war and how it affects people's lives), "Juste après" (inspired by a TV documentary about the work of Médecins Sans Frontières in Congo that showed a missionary sister's harrowing struggle to save a newborn's life),[10] and "Tu manques".

It was called Les Enfoirés, originally a very crude and offensive term literally translatable as "covered in diarrhea" but whose colloquial meaning is "the bastards", "the assholes", or (a gimmick Coluche used in his shows) in its more casual sense, "motherfucker".

It was a role he filled until 2016, when he decided to quit after a song he wrote for that year's charity album, "Toute la vie", sparked controversy.

Some of the song's lyrics were deemed "reactionary", with Goldman being accused of an unfair portrayal of current youth and a desire to create a pointless opposition between young and old generations.

[13] Throughout his career, Goldman has frequently composed for other singers (sometimes using pseudonyms), most notably Johnny Hallyday (the whole Gang album in 1985, among his most successful) and Céline Dion.

His half-brother Pierre Goldman, a left-wing intellectual and convicted robber later acquitted by a French court, was murdered in mysterious circumstances in Paris in 1979.